My main first-year memory is also of masses of colour in movement. Pink with slashes of brown and black.

In seeking to describe the image more clearly, I realise it is like the pastel drawing of a nude model, bending down as if to examine her feet, which we bought from our painter friend Pat Harris in Brussels in 1989. There is the drawing now, hanging in its gilt frame above the fireplace. If I half-close my eyes, as I learnt to do as a mechanism for seeing the essential composition of pictures, I can recreate the movement I saw when lying on my back in the pram parked outside the French windows which opened into the garden of Cowper Drive.

I have total recall of that pram because it was the same pram which three years later was taken from the attic to carry my baby brother John.

Such prams disappeared when the firms manufacturing and supplying them went out of business. They failed to adapt to the potential of post-war technology and materials and the – by then – maid-less housewives’ demand for smaller, safer and more portable baby goods. The pram, together with most of the furniture at Cowper Drive, came from that short line of Protestant shops that stood for years on the west side of Dublin’s St. Stephen’s Green, between the Royal College of Surgeons and the top of Grafton Street. Strahans provided furniture, Mays, music and musical instruments, and the Baby Carriage Company, prams, cots and baby requisites.

The Baby Carriage Company’s luxury perambulator was in effect a plywood swing-boat slung on elegant springs between two pairs of closely mounted narrow bicycle wheels, which could be braked together when stationary. Elegance was assured by the navy-blue enamel paint finish and the navy waterproof hood. This could be pulled up to shade the baby’s head at the opposite end to where where mothers or maids took command of the stylish chrome handle, and could look over baby’s head to steer the unstable waist-high vehicle. Style and utility were combined in the creamy yellow tint of the rubber-type composition, which sheathed the chrome handle and also provided the solid tyres for the wheels.

I imagine myself installed in the pram. I now believe my memory of the constantly changing pattern of pink, brown and black to be the hands of the gardener who busied himself once a week, cutting grass and looking after flower beds and fruit trees. It cannot be much more than a fragile hypothesis, but I am convinced that my first perception is of big hands being scratched as a rose is pruned.

Early memory is silent cinema made from primary colours. From the age of two onwards my memories begin to acquire more detail, and to have aspects of sound, touch and smell.

Read on: 1941 – A World at War